This is Tracker written by Marc Espie and ported to AIX4 by Trevor Cordes.
This is a simple binary distribution to get users up and running quickly.
Skip down to QUICKSTART if you want to get moving immediately.

Tracker is a .MOD file player.  MOD's are music/audio files that sequence
audio samples together to form a song.  They originated on the Amiga. 
While not sounding as nice as MP3's these days quality-wise, they take up
a much smaller amount of disk space.  And the creativity and talent in
some of the available MOD files is amazing considering we're talking
1990-1995 audio hardware.

MOD's are widely available on the internet free of charge and there have
even been some CD-ROM's made solely dedicated to MOD's.  Gryzor's "MODS
Anthology" 4CD set is an excellent example.

Back in 1995 when I got my first PowerPC with AIX, I immediately went
looking for a MOD player for UNIX.  The only one I could find was Marc's
tracker program.  It looked great and someone had even ported it to AIX,
but only for the older machines with the baud0 device.  I had a brand
spanking new PowerSeries 850 with a paud0 device.  After playing around
with the code without xlc, and without any AIX programming documentation,
I finally hacked it into running on paud0.  End result is now it will
run on most of the newer PCI-based RS/6000's that use planar paud0,
including the ThinkPad PowerSeries machines!


QUICKSTART:::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::

You should un-tar the distribution file as root from the root directory,
that way everything goes in its proper place.  If you un-tar from any
other directory or as non-root then you'll get a jumble of directories
you'll have to sort through.

For optimal results, set the following environment variable:
TRACKER_DEFAULTS=-stereo -mix 80 -freq 44 -tolerant -verbose

These are pretty good defaults that I use myself.  You can play with them
once you read the full documentation and get acquainted with the program. 

Now run the binary by typing "tracker filename".  I include a sample song
"hitsquad.mod" which is one of my favorites.  It should be in /tmp so you
can play it by typing "tracker /tmp/hitsquad.mod".  If you like it be sure
to save it to another directory so it doesn't get auto-deleted.

Now go read the original documentation in /usr/local/lib/tracker/Docs
then email your thanks to Marc and to myself :-)  And if you send some
$$ Marc's way, I wouldn't mind some either ;-)


TROUBLE-SHOOTING::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::

If you don't hear anything, make sure either you have the internal speaker
turned on (run the UMS audio mixer and make sure both it and the internal
speaker are clicked on), or you have something (speakers, headphones or
stereo) plugged into the line-out/headphone-out jack of your computer.
Make sure the volume in the UMS audio mixer is turned up to a reasonable
level.  If you have a ThinkPad, make sure the volume dial is turned up.

If it still doesn't work and you get wacky errors, chances are you don't
have a paud0 device.  Do a "ls /dev/paud0".  If the file doesn't exist
then either you don't have it configured properly or your hardware
doesn't support it.  If you have a /dev/baud0 device then you _might_
be able to get the original tracker source working as it had baud0
support before I got my hands on it.  Find yourself the source and
have fun.


NOTES:::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::

AIX's UMS is actually pretty neat and I find it useful to have the mixer
controls in the CDE dtwm front panel.  There is an action somewhere in the
UMS section of the CDE application manager that lets you do enable this.

This entire set of files is provided without any warranty whatsoever. This
entire set of files, including my updates to the code, is subject to the
copying rules and restrictions laid out by Marc Espie in his original
documentation.  This document is copyrighted by the author but permission
is granted to distribute it freely as long as it is unmodified and intact. 


-- 
Trevor Cordes	tcordes@escape.ca	Manitoba, Canada
